Nearly 25 years later the wound brought about by the bombing still runs deep, and a few news articles took advantage of the Mughniyeh story to revisit the events of 1983. Stars and Stripes offers a few choice quotes from former Marines present at their barracks’ bombing:

In addition to Mughniyeh’s responsibility for the barracks bombing, he is also pegged as being behind the kidnapping and murder of Marine Lt. Col. William Richard Higgins 20 years ago this Sunday. The Courier-Journal has his sister’s reaction:

“At least he can go to hell now,” said McCoskey, 44, of Elloree, S.C.

“I have to believe that the man upstairs is dealing out justice now, and for Imad Mughniyeh it not going to be pretty,” he said.

“He got what’s coming to him and he got the same thing he did to others,” said the former lance corporal, who lives in Folkston, Ga.

Alan Opra, 43, said he considers Mughniyeh’s death to be poetic justice.

“I was happy that he died the way he died because he died in a car bomb and he orchestrated a truck bomb, so it was like karma,” said Opra, of Harrison Township, Mich., and a lance corporal at the time of the attack.

Just a few weeks before Mughniyeh’s death, residents on Long Island, NY held a special ceremony to remember Joseph P. Milano, a Navy medic also killed in the 1983 bombings. The occasion was to rename a stretch of road in his honor after one local man who often visited Milano’s grave. From Newsday:

Fisher last spoke to her brother, a decorated veteran from multiple tours in Vietnam, on Valentine’s Day 1988, three days before he was captured while on a peacekeeping mission for the United Nations.

“He said he was not afraid of being in Beirut, that they would not hurt him as long as he was in a U.N. jeep,” she said. He was abducted from such a jeep on Feb. 17, 1988.

It happened because a man who never met Milano decided, after 20 years of silently visiting Milano’s grave, that a tribute was in order.

Thomas Weil, 42, of St. James, a Marine who went to Sachem North (formerly Sachem High School), saw the list of casualties on the day of the Beirut bombing and learned that a man from Farmingville had died. He started visiting Milano’s Calverton grave after he returned from his own duties, which included time in Beirut, in 1986.

Last year, as the 25th anniversary of Milano’s death approached, Weil contacted Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) and started the chain of events that led to yesterday’s ceremony.